NEC and its subsidiary OCC announced that they have completed qualification of subsea repeaters and optical cable containing up to 24 fiber pairs (FPs) (48 fibers), achieving 50 percent improvement in fiber count over the 16 fiber pair systems.
This development allows cable owners to construct subsea telecom cables with superior traffic capacity while reducing the cost per bit of the wet plant. This approach is fully in line with SDM (Space Division Multiplexing) system architectures.
NEC’s 24 FP solution provides more flexibility to operate in the subsea fiber pair market and enables better connectivity in high-density subsea branches.
NEC achieved this milestone with minor modifications to its repeater and cable designs. Keeping NEC’s quadruple pump redundancy in the repeater and maintaining OCC’s outstanding cabling performance has resulted in cabled attenuations lower than 0.150dB/km.
NEC said low attenuation is critical to achieve large spectral efficiency as well as lower power consumption.
“As demands for capacity and FP flexibility continue to soar, NEC is committed to helping our customers to build up their subsea networks with large spectral efficiency, lower power consumption and large-scale subsea connectivity,” said Yoshihisa Inada, deputy general manager and Head of Subsea Technology Development at NEC’s Submarine Network Division.
OCC’s 24 fiber pair cable can be manufactured using existing optical fibers, according to the needs of each new cable system. Each fiber can be visually identified using a combination of ring marking and conventional fiber coloring. In OCC cable, the fiber’s transmission performance is completely unaffected, either by the fiber marking or cabling processes.
“We have concluded that the use of our fibers in OCC’s 24 pair cable results in a cabled attenuation matching the nominal value. Our fibers can contribute to achieve large capacity, high spectral efficiency and low power consumption in transoceanic networks,” said Masashi Onishi, general manager at Optical Fiber and Cable division of Sumitomo Electric Industries.
“OCC’s cabling process for 24 fiber pairs works with our high quality fiber to meet the challenge,’ said Bernhard Deutsch, VP and GM, Optical Fiber & Cable, Corning.
